"Ohh so your new song is called City Lights?! I have a great idea for that!"

When I got a call from the band asking me to do a video for their upcoming single I had just recently checked out the many inspirational works of people posting at instructables.com and found my way to the amazing movies made by the japanese light-painting crew PIKAPIKA. I did a few tests on my own and was able to get the band and a crew on board. We did a few more tests together until we felt confident we could pull it all off. In total we worked two full days indoors, two long nights outdoors and about three days with editing and post production.

Credits:

Produced by: Benjamin Taft, Johannes Petterson, Jonatan WestmanMain photography by: Benjamin TaftAdditional photography by: Daniel PalmerEditing & Post: Jonatan Westman, Benjamin TaftLight-painters: Johannes Petterson, Jonatan Westman, additional work by the rest of the crew and the band, a special shout out to Bjorn Janson (drummer in the band) who did the many of the detailed light paintings.

Step 1: Preparations - what you will need

- Darkness (a dark room or from sunset to sunrise)- A lot of patience and patient friends/collegues- A camera (any camera will work but I recommend a digital SLR, we used a Nikon D40 and a Canon 350D/Rebel)- LEDs/Flashlighs of all kinds, the brighter the better- A video editing application to put it all together into a video sequence (We used a combination of Adobe After Effects and Apple Final Cut Pro)

I'm going to feel really silly for asking this, but how did you make it so the person painting isn't in the shot? I've seen some attempts by other people at still images, and they don't look half as good since there is a blur of a person there.

This is one of my attempts at a similar concept. My hand was waved around in front of the camera within the 8 seconds and as mentioned by buenoben as long as you keep moving it does not get seen by the camera especially when in dark clothes (black preferably)

I guess it's all about making sure the people paining don't reflect much ambient light by wearing light absorbing dark clothing for instance. Another thing would be to use as long exposure times as possible and have the lightpainters try to stay mobile (never stay in one place for long) and hidden behind the subjects when possible.

What an amazing video! (I liked the song a lot too!) Maybe I'll try something with this myself...? I haven't used my camera in a while. Although I suppose first I should find my charger... XD Thank you for sharing; you did a great job! :D

wow. u made this? wow. gotta appreciate the work put in to it. this is so beyond professional! and a still camera was used? i cant even do that with my high def video camera! i MUST get a dslr! but im guessing this is more the talent of the creator, and i aint got a lot of that. kudos to u!

A low end dsl will work fine, I used a Nikon d40 with the kit lens. A point and shoot will work too if you can set long exposures in manual mode, but I found the ones I tried to be really slow at processing the long exposure shots (10 seconds as opposed to half a second for the d40)

Awesome! I love it! I don't know if I can do this with my camera as it is a terrible camera (some Olypus one that I can't remember the name of-it is really old) although I must try it. I'm off to get my camera!

Yes, thats Gothenburg alright, my hometown. Are you familiar with the place? The close-up shot with the microphone actually has a whole separate story to it, since it was an audio sync captured with still frames / stop motion we had to come up with a novel approach to it.

No kidding, I can't wait for affordable video cameras with the same quality, some digital slrs are getting pretty good continuous burst modes, I suspect using them for video would not be good for the mechanics. I if the ones that feature "live view" modes could be made to output it as a video stream, at least you would be making use of the superior optics of a dslr. Maybe they already exist? Still, for now, stop motion is the the way to go :) Appreciate the kudos!